Integrating external services into an application is often challenging.
Instead of doing the testing manually, the setup could be tested also automated.
In case you are using Spring Boot, for a couple of services there exist an integration.
This blog post will show how you can setup your Kafka tests to use an embedded Kafka server.

Storing dates in databases was traditionally done with java.sql.Date and java.sql.Timestamp.
Since we would like to write modern applications, with Java 8 or 11, it is preferable to use an OffsetDateTime or a LocalDateTime.
Spring Data JPA, for example, is mapping those fields automatically to the correct database field.
There are still some challenges in combination with PostgreSQL.

One of the goals I set for this year is to explore Machine Learning (ML), so after having done a couple of courses here and there, I decided to do a -rather simple- starting project, where I could deal with some of the basic stages of the ML: Get the data, prepare it, choose a model, train it, evaluate it, export it, and make the predictions available for use.
For this first project, I chose:

Spring Cloud Stream 2.0 comes with a more consistent and simplified message transformation support. In this blog post we look into how we can convert a message in XML format received on a channel to JSON and send it to another channel to be consumed by further message handlers.